Share your Builds

If you don't mind a mod skill in the mix, I've had hella fun with this:

Killer Vegan
Ninjitsu
Vampirism
Thrown Weapons
Alchemy
Smithing
Tourist OR Paranormal Investigator


Seems odd, but it works surprisingly well. There's a LOT of synergies:

Keeping Full HP:

• Vegan gives HP and HP regen, which helps Vampirism leech more with every kill/corpse drain.
• Alchemy gives oodles of Healing Potions (don't bother saving your iron for Smithing), and Mana Potions to power your Ninjitsu spells.
• Smithing gives you 2 Iron Ingots out of each Iron Ore (which means 4 rust, which means 4 Healing Potions.)
• Tourist is one more point of HP regen, and Vampirism scales off of it fast, so every point really counts.

Avoiding Melee:

• Vegan gives pets and Blinding Flash procs, which make it easier to stay out of melee.
• Throwing gives Monster Toss, which also makes staying out of melee easier.
• Ninjitsu gives you invisibility-on-dodge and a get-out-of-melee-free spell (Substitution Jutsu) and a stun-on-crit proc.

Killing Stuff:

• Vegan gives Righteous Damage, which applies to thrown weapons.
• Ninjitsu gives you unlimited throwing ammo.
• Smithing gives you Throwing Stars out of steel igots and NZappa Zapps out of Crude Iron Axes (so save them all!)
• Alchemy gives you the almighty Noxious Brimstone Flask as well as a small variety of other AoE Throws.
• Ninjitsu has wild and crazy throwing procs with Kuji Kiri
• Throwing procs Fleshbore and Crushed Bones, making your thrown attacks nastier.

Other:

• Tourist gives your Vampire the ability to eat anything, which is nice, and the Get Out Of Trouble Free card, which you can totally cheat with by spreading your various Throwing Daggers out across your inventory, making it quite likely that you'll drop one of those instead of anything important.
• Paranormal Investigator, on the other hand, has Xenochemistry which works well with Alchemy, and also has Alien Autopsy, which works well with the multiple crafting skills to make sure you'll have plenty of high-end hidden recipes by the time you can use them.

 

Thank you for your suggestion guys I will try it out combination of things.

Essence unfortunately I haven't beaten Dredmor yet so I am not using any mods :/

 

How would the following build be? I tried a couple of crafting melee builds, but generally that got a bit tedious (moster zoo's take ages).

Now I was thinking:

Perception
Archery
Rogue scientist
Daggers
Dual wield
Piracy
Magical law

The idea is to have lot's of counterchance. In order to deal with mages I'll have gag order as well as aoe damage from rogue scientist.
Tactic for dredmor would be to create many invisibility and healing potions, gag order him, and keep shooting at him (while hopefully knocking him back with the archery blast). Once he's closeby I can put up swashbuckling, hit a couple of times and put up a invisibility potion.

Would this be viable?
I'm thinking of instead of perception to take burglary. Does lockup work against dredmor? And does it break if I damage him?

Thanks!

 

Waervyn Try:

Warlockery
Dual Wield
Staves
Viking wizardry
Necronomiconomics
Emomancy
Ley line walker

This is the warrior build I used to get to lvl 14. Though I died from my own stupidity. never got to lvl 14 again from that day >.>

All prase to Essence who shared this build with me

 

Thanks for the tip, could you (if you can be bothered) give me a small overview on what the purpose of that build is? (which skills to level first etc.)?

Thanks a lot

 

died last night to some rare monster. Hit for 35 damage, 30 of it being on floor 7. I was foolish as I had tons of invis pots from perception, but being a melee heavy build (without a weapon specific) I thought I would survive more than 1 hit. As it was almost dead.

Even with a high block, the RNG hated on me.
But the build was pretty fun

Clockwork Knight
Perception
Blacksmithing
Communism
Demonology
Berserker
Paranormal Investigator

All in all, It was great except I never once found a still on NTTG. I could have used it with the 1 point from xenochemistry.

 

The basic concept is to end up as a melee wizard, using Necro's Mark of Cththon and Pact of Fleeting Life, the Staves skill, and Warlockery to hit people in the face with sticks while using Tenebrous Rift to clear zoos. Viking Wizardry and Dual Wield are basically just there for their first levels, respectively, to get you through the first floor.

Step 1: Establish basic melee competence: take Staves level 2.

Step 2: Protect yourself from Necro's downsides: take Emomancy to The Cure, then Warlockery 2, then Emomancy up to Mark of the Black Eyeliner. Between Mage's Mana Maille and Mark of the Black Eyeliner, you have enough to spam Necro spells fairly willy-nilly. During this time, your main offense will be staves and My Chemical Explosion, which is amazing in the early floors.

Step 3: Necrofy. Take Necro up to Tenebrous Rift. Keep Mark of Cththon and Mark of the Black Eyeliner up constantly; use Pact of Fleeting Life every time you face a horde, and Rift for zoos.

Step 4: Ley Lines. All the way up. Need mana, and the teleport is critical.

Step 5: Warlockery. Up to Arcane Capacitor. Or all the way, because after that, you're wide open. Now that you've reached max ability, your basic tactics for ordinary monsters are "hit in face. repeat." For named mobs, it's "teleport away. Pelt with spells until it's 4 squares away. Activate Arcane Capacitor. Pelt with 3 more spells. Punch in face with charged Capacitor. If it's still alive, hit Chronomantic Twist and beatstick it in the face for a few rounds." For zoos, it's "Tenebrous Rift. Close door. Collect XP."

It's a really powerful build whose only real weakness is in Step 2, when you have to play a couple of levels with high squishiness and only moderate offense.




Warlockery
Dual Wield
Staves
Viking wizardry
Necronomiconomics
Emomancy
Ley line walker

 

Then try switching Wandlore (yep!) for Ninjitsu. Wandlore gives you even more healing, decursing, damage to your thrown weapons, and some bonus in addition to more fodder for Alien Autopsy. Also, encrusts!

 

Egyptian Magic
Magical Law
Tourist
Emomancy (could have probably used Mathmagic instead, only wanted it for the lv 1 ability to teleport away from bad things)
Laywalker
Magic Training
Bloodmage

Use Laylines, Extra-planar Concentration, and Bloodmagic to keep my mana high while I use all 4 Egyptian Magic glyphs and Sandstorm anyone I see to oblivion. Or Gag order them if there's only 1 and I don't feel like wasting mana. Or just smack them with Ra's Blast if they're already close enough for that. It's really mana intensive, and also really really powerful.

 

I took your (Essence's) build and went XP crazy with it. It's doing rather fine at lvl 6 with half of the second and 1/3 of the first floor explored and no inconsequentia or wizardlands quests. GR.

I went

Warlockery
Necronomiconomics
Emomancy
Lay Line walker
Big Game Hunter
Archeology
Burglary

Went lvl 2 Burglary, BGH up to lvl 4, lvl 2 Archeology, i'm close to next lvl which will be lvl 2 Necro so I can kill guys behing bars which includes a 600 XP Baron who blinked there at a sliver of XP, that along with all the warehouse fodder ought to get me back on track rather soon.

Then I'm building the way you did. Got lucky with a +2 traps ring along with a +1 traps gauntlets. Also managed to clear the lvl 2 zoo right away with an icicly wand drop. Never tried warlockery before, seems a bit overpowered

 

Be sure to use "Essence of Battle" to "Empower" your abilities. You'll lose all your mana but you'll destroy everything
Using it with "Charged Arcane Capacitor" will make a light show =3

Only "Chronomantic Twist" can't be empowered though :/

 

Chronomantic Twist can be empowered. It gives you an extra turn of enemy-paralyzing power if you do.

 

Number 1 cause of death in DoD

I'm still tinkering with the optimal burglary/counterstrike build for beating GR - painfully, I lost the last one to a random crash + cloud issue after having had insanely good item luck on the first few levels (complete with a Ring of Digglish Torment from a 1st level fountain).

Currently I'm running:

Burglary (for stealing and panic buttons)
Piracy (for swashbuckling)
Dual-wielding (for more counter)
Daggers (for even more counter)
Communism (experimenting with this for the first time. Hammer & Sickle to start ensures early viability with a dual-wield build regardless of item luck, and the first skill is handy too)
Fungal Arts (great skill for any build)
Big Game Hunter (more xp, to reach ~100 counter chance sooner).

Haven't got that far on my current run. I'm considering swapping out Piracy next time, since I figure it might end up being a crutch as I plan on eventually getting near-100 counter chance unbuffed anyway. It's just SO handy for dealing with early elites/zoos, but I suppose I could use ranged consumables for that instead (or swap it out for Tinkering so I could make bolts for that purpose). I might also swap in swords for better counter-chance, I just hate being shoehorned into a particular weapon type - especially with a dual-wielding build.

 

I've been doing a bunch of theme builds

Throwing
-Thrown Weapons
-Smithing (for thrown knives)
-Alchemy (for brimstone flasks)
-Piracy (for cannonballs)
-Clockwork Knight (for building concussion bombs)
-Perception (for crafting ingredients and increased sight range)
-Tourist (for increased sight range and because I hadn't tried it yet)

Ultimate Crafting
-Smithing
-Tinkering
-Alchemy
-Wandcrafting
-Clockwork Knight
-Rogue Scientist
-Perception (for crafting ingredients)

Mobility
-Mathemagic
-Clockwork Knight
-Artful Dodger
-Emomancy (for love will teleport us away)
-Magical Law (for confiscate Evidence)
-Golemancy (for Digging Ray)
(I forget the last one, but it wasn't wither of the ones that it should've been [ie. Tourism for Get Away From it All or Werediggle for digging])

Economics
-Bankster
-Communist
-Necronomeconomics
-Mathemagic
-Piracy
-Burglary
-Magical law

 

Try this for a run down & touch bottom build:
Archeology
Burglary
Perception
Dodger
Law
Assassination
Psionics

Never Krong anything but the fedora.

Run down & touch bottom is: as soon as you have found three exits you can't explore any new territory on that level. Oh, and you gotta wear the fedora all the time.

...ef

 

Why Artful Dodger?

 

Why not?

In truth, I originally had Paranormal instead of Psi but I was getting a less than 30% survival over the first few encounters so I swapped Psionics for Paranormal and left the rest of the build the same.
...ef

 

I prefer the "meteoric descent" variant, where you clear DL 1 and then take the first flight of stairs down you find every time (no going back up). I usually die spectacularly around DL 7.

 

Run Down & Touch Bottom can be challenging with a character who has minimal combat skills & no crafting.

 

Now I remember, it was Paranormal Investigator for Close Encounter.